PASADENA, Calif. — Kevin Bacon didn’t plan it this way, but this is the curve fate threw him. On Jan. 21st Bacon will make his series regular debut in the most talked about, mulled over and criticized network television drama of the past 15 years — and The Following hasn’t even aired yet.

The Following, in which Bacon plays a semi-retired FBI agent lured back to duty to help track down a charismatic serial killer and his cult of followers, has some of the most disturbing, explicitly violent moments of any mainstream TV drama in recent memory. The timing could not be worse, coming as it is on the heel of several publicized mass shootings in the U.S. and the renewed debate about the causal connection — if one exists — between violence in popular entertainment and real-world acts of seemingly random violence.

Bacon, 54, is one of feature filmdom’s most recognizable and hardest-working actors, having appeared in more than 60 feature films, starting with Animal House in 1978 and including such more recent films as Mystic River, Frost/Nixon and X-Men: First Class.

From his point of view, The Following found him, rather than the other way around.

“I was looking for a long time, probably three or four years. And from the moment I made that decision (to consider TV) I started to read just one amazing script after another,” Bacon said. “What really struck me was, all of a sudden, after reading so many movie scripts, the level of writing just changed and I was suddenly reading all this amazing material. I read this one, and all of a sudden I just could not put it down.

“It was such a page-turner. It was such an interesting character. And yet, even given its fast-paced, heart-pounding nature, it still had a lot of heart and a kind of sentimentality that I really responded to.”

The Following was written and conceived by Kevin Williamson, whose past creations range from the coming-of-age drama Dawson’s Creek to The Vampire Diaries to the Scream film series.

The Following is not like any of them.

The Following is not for the squeamish, for one thing.

“It’s not for the faint of heart, definitely,” Williamson said. “You have to look away. But that’s not the sum of the show. There’s also drama and emotion, and a lot of other things running through it. We’re mindful of what we’re doing. We’re taking it episode by episode. Every episode’s different. A lot of people may die in one, but no one may die the next week. Over time, the show takes shape. It takes shape as you write it.”

Williamson says he was affected by last month’s Newtown, Conn. school shootings as much as anyone.

“Who wasn’t affected by Sandy Hook? I’m still disturbed when I think of Aurora. We sat in the writers’ room after that happened and . . . look, we’re all traumatized by it. There’s a point where that gets too real, and it’s very disturbing.

“I’m writing fiction. I’m just a storyteller. Could there be this cumulative effect? I don’t know. I know it affected me. I know that what happens in the real world affects me. When I take pen to paper, it’s there. There’s a reaction, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

Bacon, for his part, says he’s simply immersed himself in playing his character. That’s what gets him through the day-to-day.

“I always keep going back to that,” Bacon said. “I think the plot is all really interesting. But when I pick up a script, week to week, I look at what’s going to happen to this guy today, and what going to happen in his relationships with other people. Those are the things that are most interesting to me.

“I think that one of the things people will hopefully latch onto with the show is this kind of love story, and the internal, personal struggles my character had before these new relationships even began. As we’ll find out over time, it’s all about the human aspect of the show.”

While Bacon is new to television, his wife — Kyra Sedgwick — appeared in The Closer for seven years. Bacon directed several episodes during that time. The pace of TV is nothing new to him.

The immediacy with which The Following became part of the public conversation did take him by surprise, though.

“We’re shooting episode 11 now, of 15,” Bacon said. “By the time we’ll get on the air we’ll only have a few episodes left in the season. It’s an interesting process because we all have feelings about the show. We’re excited about where it’s going, the way it looks and all those kinds of things. We haven’t really tossed it our there into the public.

“And yet . . . it’s a fast-paced world when it comes to television. It’s been kind of an adventure already.”

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile